Infrastructure for Open Science: Research Data and Publications

In this presentation we shall give an overview of the components of Croatian national e-infrastructure that underpin open science, open access, open research data, and open educational resources. These include the Portal of Croatian Scientific and Professional Journals (HRČAK), Digital Academic Archives and Repositories (DABAR), and Croatian Research Information System (CroRIS). We will look at how these three systems work now and how they will fit together the information layers of the national e-Infrastructure.

SRCE has actively supported open access since 2006, when it led the development of HRČAK following the initiative of the Croatian Information and Documentation Society (HIDD) with the support of the Ministry of Science and Education (MSE). Over the years, HRČAK has grown into an internationally recognized system that supports Open Access (OA) and gives journal editors a free way to publish their journal and gain greater visibility. HRČAK seeks to follow the trends of modern publishing by promoting transition to a more efficient editorial workflow (Open Journal Systems, OJS), persistent digital identifiers of authors (ORCID) and publishing in advanced formats (Journal Article Tag Suite XML, JATS XML).

HRČAK profiled itself as a specialized solution for publishing scientific and professional journals. Infrastructural support for research and higher education institutions in meeting the requirements of open science started five years ago (2015) through the development of the national repository system DABAR. Since then, DABAR has been accepted as a technical solution for long-term preservation and dissemination by over 130 institutions and has a user community involved in its development through 10 working groups. DABAR started as support for publication of student papers. Now it fully supports various types of publications: articles published in journals or conference proceedings, books, book chapters, presentations, dissertations, technical documentation, plans, and reports. In addition, DABAR also supports open research data (datasets), open educational resources (like surveys, simulations, demonstrations, and experiments), and various artistic outputs such as photographs, audio, and audio-visual content.

CroRIS is being developed as a full-scale Current Research Information System (CRIS) to be deployed at a national level. This system will incorporate data on researchers, institutions, and various aspects of research activities, research results in particular. It will make most of the data it contains publicly available. As a hub of research information, CroRIS will connect HRČAK and DABAR and pair their metadata with the existing data on researchers, projects, publications, and journals to provide more comprehensive research information to the public and enable deep linking between the two systems to streamline data entry and eliminate data duplication.

If developed as planned, the presented systems will give researchers, librarians, and decision makers a better insight into the current state of research. To that end, they will make permanent identifiers as usable and interoperable as possible.

Key words

e-Infrastructure, open science, DABAR, HRČAK, CroRIS